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1: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 May 17;102(20):7398-401. Epub 2005 May 6.
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Emotion expression in human punishment behavior.

Xiao E, Houser D.

Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and Department of Economics, George Mason University, 4400 University Boulevard, MSN 1B2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.

Evolutionary theory reveals that punishment is effective in promoting cooperation and maintaining social norms. Although it is accepted that emotions are connected to punishment decisions, there remains substantial debate over why humans use costly punishment. Here we show experimentally that constraints on emotion expression can increase the use of costly punishment. We report data from ultimatum games, where a proposer offers a division of a sum of money and a responder decides whether to accept the split, or reject and leave both players with nothing. Compared with the treatment in which expressing emotions directly to proposers is prohibited, rejection of unfair offers is significantly less frequent when responders can convey their feelings to the proposer concurrently with their decisions. These data support the view that costly punishment might itself be used to express negative emotions and suggest that future studies will benefit by recognizing that human demand for emotion expression can have significant behavioral consequences in social environments, including families, courts, companies, and markets.

Publication Types:
PMID: 15878990 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

PMCID: PMC1129129